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Tuesday, February 17, 2015

As
I write this DC Comics is once again planning an event called
Convergence that will change, in some way or another, the nature of
the continuity of its universe. This is only a little over three
years since the launch of the New 52, which threw out (in my opinion
anyway), seventy-five years of history and legacy. Over at Marvel
Comics they are hyping their new Secret Wars event, and while the
details of what this will eventually mean are vague it looks like
Marvel will also be doing some restructuring of their continuity.

And,
of course, the fans are losing their minds. Not everyone. A response
I'm seeing a lot of is the eye-rolling, “here we go again” kind
of exhaustion that goes along with these big events.

But
that's not really what I want to talk about here. Not really. I've
been through reboots and Crises and Zero Hours and Incursions enough
to know that, in the world of Marvel and DC Comics, this too shall
pass. What I want to talk about is the larger issue of the idea of
“Continuity” in comics (and to a lesser degree in other media),
and why it's so important to fans, and I want to do it in the context
of my previous post about memory and recapitulation.

First,
some background.

Continuity
wasn't really an issue in comics for many years. Throughout the 40s
and 50s readers were content to read self-contained stories that had
little relationship to each other from month to month. We knew
Superman's background and his supporting cast. As long as these were
maintained, anything else was fair game. DC would actually label any
story that broke these very basic and simple guidelines as “imaginary
stories,” meaning, stories that take place outside of continuity.

It
was in the Silver Age of comics (roughly the late 50s through the mid
60s), that continuity became important. Marvel certainly pioneered
this concept by making all of their titles exist in the same world in
a much more coherent way than DC had done prior to then. Events in
one story would have lasting ramifications. If Aunt May had a heart
attack in one issue she would still be in the hospital in the next.
It created the illusion of the passage of time and reflected the real
world more accurately.

This
was easy enough to maintain when there were only a handful of books
and a few years had passed. It became much more complicated as time
went on. Tony Stark created the Iron Man armor while a prisoner in
Viet Nam. The Fantastic Four launched a rocket into space to beat the
Russians in the space race. Things like this made complete sense for
a number of years. Not so much fifty years later.

These
sorts of issues have usually been addressed obliquely by Marvel with
a sliding time scale. It wouldn't be mentioned for awhile and next
thing you know Stark is building his armor in a cave in Afghanistan.

Continuity,
the sense that there is a canonical storyline, is important to many
fans. I am certainly guilty of this. As much as many of us say that
all that matters is that we are told a good story, part of our
definition of good story is dependent on how well it fits in with our
own sense of the continuity of the characters. Whether fans say they
care or not, it has an effect on what books they read and what kind
of emotional investment they have in the characters. We all have a
head canon of what “actually” happened to these characters and
what didn't.

In
my personal head canon Hawkeye is morally opposed to killing no
matter how many stories Brian Michael Bendis wrote indicating
differently. The DC New 52 makes no sense to me if Dick Grayson
didn't grow up with Wally West and Donna Troy and become adults while
they were in the Teen Titans, none of which is true according to
current continuity. And yes, these are some of my personal bugaboos,
but we all have them. As much as I say I want change and different
points of view and these characters and universes need to grow and
change, the truth is I always have a certain knee-jerk reaction
against anything that contradicts my version of what took place, and
I'm ready to pull out the back issues to prove my point. It's all
right there in black and white and four-color printing. This actually
happened. It's canon!

Which
makes me ask the question, “Why?”

In
my last blog I talked about the unreliable nature of our personal
memory, about how none of us have access to the reality of any past
event, simply the story we tell about it. I can tell an anecdote from
my own life that other people who were there will remember completely
differently. The truth is, we're never sure of what really took place
in any definitive way. There is no official canonical version of our
past. We live our lives with the illusion of continuity but all we
really have is our own personal head canon of what we believe
happened. The stories of other people may contradict our version, or
add a different dimension of information. This current moment is
defined by the story we have constructed about our previous lives,
but if any or all of our memories are suspect, then who the hell am I
right now.

Welcome
to Existential Angst 101.

No
wonder a definitive continuity is important to us in our fictions.
How nice it would be to pull out a back issue of our lives from
twenty years ago and check to see what happened exactly the same way
we experienced it then. Then we could argue with someone with a
different opinion with some degree of authority.

Even
if it is unconscious, we long for certainty in our lives. It's part
of why we write fiction and tell stories. In our search for order
amidst the chaos we create a narrative. We attempt to impose plot and
structure on the random events of our day to day, to make sense of
the many unrelated aspects of our existence. When something breaks
our sense of continuity in comics we feel betrayed. I remember Peter
Parker and Mary Jane Watson being married... what do mean that never
happened? But it's easier to argue over this obviously imaginary
story than it is to reconcile conflicting narratives about our own
failed relationships.

In
the introduction to his story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (Superman #423), Alan Moore, in direct reference to
the aforementioned practice of labelling out of continuity stories as
Imaginary Stories, famously said, “This is an imaginary story...
Aren't they all?” At the time this was seen by many as a negative
reaction to DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths, which consigned
much of Superman's previous history to non-canonical status. None of
those stories were real any more, as if any of them had any
reality beyond the printed page anyway. I think it was more than
that. I think it was commentary on the breadth of the imagination.

The
old stories don't go away when the official continuity is changed.
They're still there anytime someone picks up a back issue or a trade
paperback collection. Grant Morrison addresses this overtly in the
pages of Animal Man where a group of old DC characters who had
been consigned to Limbo by the Crisis discover, “Every time
someone reads our stories we live again!”

Unless
you have been keeping a running diary of your life, written as events
happened to you, you probably don't have a canonical history that you
can refer to. Even if you do, maybe it's time to start questioning
the back story you've been telling about yourself. Maybe not. How is
the story you tell helping you live life to the fullest? How is your
story limiting you? Maybe it's time for a soft reboot and a retelling
before a Crisis makes it necessary.